Canvas

Using the canvas

How the canvas is laid out, pressing and drag and drop, panels, undo, and using it with a keyboard and on a phone

Open a work and a canvas spreads out.

What memos, relationships and chapters each are is covered in Memos and tags, Relationships and Chapters and plot.

How the canvas is laid out

The canvas has no place where you put cards wherever you like. PenPick decides where each card shows. You drag and drop cards to change what they mean, and the canvas redraws to match.

From the top, it's laid out like this.

Canvas tools: A small row of icons floating at the top left of the canvas. Hover over an icon to see its name.
Tag row: The five built-in tags (Character, Place, Rule, Clue, Event) and the tags you made, in one row. Built-in tags have a lock, and your tags have a # before the name.
Whole work: The top box. Every memo in the work gathers here once, along with events not yet placed in any chapter's plot. At the end of the row is an “Add memo” card.
Chapters: Below that, chapters are laid out in order. In the box after the last chapter is “Add chapter.”

The order chapters are laid out in

On a desktop, chapters are laid out three to a row. The first row runs left to right, and the next row turns back and runs right to left, in a snaking line. The arrows between chapters show the order.

A chapter box has these, from the top.

Chapter name: The tab at the very top of the box. Press it to open the chapter panel.
What this chapter is about: Shows under the name if you've written it.
Plot: The events that happen in this chapter, numbered and in order. The plot also snakes three to a row, and faint lines connect the events. The small circles on an event card are the first letters of the memos that appear in it. At the end is “Add event.”
Related memos: The memos that appear in this chapter. A memo card shows the first line of its By chapter (memo) entry, or the first line of its body if nothing is written there.

What a card shows

A memo card shows a small dot in its built-in tag's color, the name, your tags and the first line of the body. If you leave the name blank, it shows as “Untitled.” Event cards in the Whole work box carry an “@event” mark.

You decide the order of cards in the Whole work box. The further forward a memo is, the more weight it's taken to carry in the story, and a chapter's related memos and the circles on event cards follow this order too. How to change the order is in “Drag and drop” below.

Canvas tools

The canvas tools at the top left of the canvas. Hover over an icon to see its name. When there's nothing to undo, Undo looks faded like Redo.

There's no zoom or minimap. When the canvas is bigger than the screen, scroll up, down and sideways to see it.

Making new things

How to make memos, events and tags is in Memos and tags, and “Add event” at the end of a chapter's plot is in Chapters and plot.

Pressing: focusing on one thing

When you press a card

Press a card and only that card and what's connected to it stay bright while the rest fade, and the card's panel opens on the right. Press the same card again or press an empty spot (Esc works too) to let go.

Chapter 2 of *Pride and Prejudice*. Try pressing a memo or an event. A memo lights up its relationship names and the events it appears in. An event lights up the memos that appear in that scene. Press an empty spot to let go.

When you press a tag

Press a tag in the tag row and only the cards with that tag light up. Press “Character” and only character cards like Elizabeth, Darcy and Wickham are left. When you pick by tag, no lines are drawn, and the tag's panel opens on the right. Press the same tag again to turn it off.

When you press a chapter name

Press the name at the very top of a chapter box and the chapter panel opens. This lets go of any card focus.

Panels

Press a card, a tag or a chapter name and a panel opens: on the right side of the canvas on a desktop, and filling the screen on a phone. There's no save button. Things save as you type, or when you leave a field.

The actual panel contents from the *Pride and Prejudice* canvas. Switch between the memo, event, chapter and tag panels above. You can scroll inside a panel.

Press a name in a row to jump to that card, and press × to take that row out or remove the link. The eye icon is the point-of-view switch (Chapters and plot). The trash-can “Delete” deletes right away without asking, but Undo can bring it back.

About the work

Press “About the work” in the canvas tools and a panel opens where you write the work's title and its About the work text. More in Works.

Drag and drop

Most of what you do on the canvas is drag and drop. The same card means different things depending on where you drop it.

While you drag, passing over a card previews what will happen when you drop. A ring around a card means it will drop onto that card. A bar at a card's edge means it will drop between that card and the one next to it. Drop where nothing is shown and nothing happens. While you drag, faded cards show bright again.

Interactions

Pick a case. While you drag, a ring appears where it will drop, and the result changes when you drop.

Drop a memo onto a memo and a window asks for the relationship name. If the two memos are already connected, the names so far are shown and you can edit them. How to change the name by chapter is in Relationships.

Drop a memo from another chapter into a chapter box and it goes into that chapter too. It doesn't leave the original chapter.

Reordering and moving

Pick a case. Drop on a card's edge and a bar appears to mean “between.”

To put something “between,” drop it near a card's edge. Roughly the outer third on each side of a card is the “between” spot, and the middle is the “onto” spot. In a snaking row that runs right to left, a card's right edge is its front.

Taking out

Drag a card you want out of a chapter into the Whole work box at the top and drop it, and it comes out.

Only memos you put straight into a chapter can be taken out of it this way. A memo that came into a chapter by appearing in an event in the plot only comes out once its link to that event is removed. You can do the same with “Take out of the flow,” “Take out of this chapter” and the × next to a link in the panel.

Limits on interactions

Some drag and drops PenPick won't accept, and it tells you why. They're blocked because they would change what a card's existing links mean.

The Event tag doesn't go together with the other built-in tags. Drop the “Character” tag on an event and a notice appears. Keep the character as its own memo and connect it to that event.
A connected card can't get or lose the Event tag. Becoming an event would turn its links into links with an event or related events. Remove the links first, then try again.
A memo that came into a chapter by appearing in an event can't be taken straight out of that chapter. Remove its link to that event, or take the event out of the plot.

The tag rules are in Memos and tags.

Undo and redo

To take back what you just did, press “Undo.” To do again what you took back, press “Redo.” They're the two arrows at the right end of the canvas tools. There are shortcuts too.

Action	Windows	Mac
Undo	Ctrl+Z	Cmd+Z
Redo	Shift+Ctrl+Z or Ctrl+Y	Shift+Cmd+Z

What you can undo is what you did by hand on the canvas.

Making memos, events, chapters and tags
Deleting memos, events, chapters and tags
Everything done by drag and drop
Adding and removing tags, renaming and recoloring tags
Making links, removing links, renaming relationships
Take out of the flow, Take out of this chapter

A few things aren't part of undo.

Text you type in a panel: For the name, body, what the chapter is about, By chapter entries and About the work, pressing Ctrl+Z (Cmd+Z) inside the field only undoes the text in that field. While you're typing, canvas undo doesn't work.
The point-of-view switch: Press it again to turn it off or change it.
Changes made by an AI you connected: Undo only remembers what you did on this screen. To undo what an AI changed, tell the AI. See Connect your AI.

The undo history only lives on the work screen you have open now. Refresh or go to another work and it's cleared. It remembers up to the last 100 steps. If something changed in the meantime and a step can't be undone, PenPick tells you and skips that step.

Using the keyboard

Cards and chapter names are all buttons, so you can move between them with Tab. Pressing Enter or Space on a card is the same as clicking it.

You can drag and drop with the keyboard too.

Press M on the card, chapter name or tag you want to move to pick it up.
Move it with the arrow keys.
Drop it with Enter or Space.
Press Esc to stop.

When moving with the keyboard too, if the middle of the moved card is toward another card's edge it goes “between,” and if it's toward the middle it goes “onto.” With a screen reader, it reads out by card name what you picked up, what it's over and where you dropped it.

When you're not dragging, pressing Esc lets go of the focus and closes the panel.

On a phone

The canvas on a phone is the same canvas as on a desktop. You can do the same things, and only the rows change to fit the width.

The Whole work box has two cards to a row.
Chapters stack one to a row, top to bottom, connected by arrows.
The plot and related memos have two to a row, and the plot snakes.

Swipe the screen to scroll the canvas. To drag a card, hold it for a moment to pick it up. Lift your finger where you want it and it drops. Drag to the top or bottom edge of the screen and the canvas scrolls along. So you can carry a card from the Whole work box all the way down to the last chapter in one go.

Panels open across the full width of the screen.